“We have a holier-than-thou” attitude in the United States about human-rights violations abroad, said Bart Carhart, a student organizer of the new Amnesty International chapter at the University of Southern Maine. “But [within our country] we’re probably just as responsible for human injustices as in many other countries.”

He was referring to the American and Maine prison systems, the subject of the opening session of USM's Human Rights Week. Running though Friday, April 4, most sessions have an international flavor, with discussions about Tibet, Burma, and Guantánamo Bay. (For the schedule, go to www.peaceactionme.org/amnesty-international-usm-human-rights-week.)

On Monday at the Woodbury Campus Center, 25 students and others viewed the 1974 documentary film Attica, about the 1971 prisoner rebellion at the overcrowded Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. A thousand mostly African-American inmates took over part of the prison and held 38 white guards hostage — all 383 Attica guards were white — and demanded an end to “slave labor,” uncensored communication with the outside world, the rights to political activity and free religious practice, and better food and medical care.

While negotiators tried to arrange a peaceful end to the confrontation, Republican governor (and later US vice-president) Nelson Rockefeller ordered police to storm the prison. They killed 31 prisoners and nine guards in a hail of gunfire. The film shows guards beating surrendering prisoners.

Former federal prisoner Ray Luc Levasseur of Brunswick, who spoke after the film’s showing, said the widespread establishment of solitary-confinement “supermax” prisons began in part as a response to the Attica uprising — as places for prison activists and “jailhouse lawyers.” Supermaxes, he said, have had a “profound impact” in tamping down the prisoner-rights struggle. He called prisons “the front line of class war” and of “white supremacy.”

He asked of human-rights proponents, “What of torture in this country? . . . Everything that’s happened at Guantánamo has been exported from American prisons,” including the use of solitary confinement — whose isolation is a gnawing pain like hunger, he said. Levasseur did 20 years, largely in solitary, for blowing up corporate offices in a campaign against South African apartheid and US-government-sponsored Latin American terrorism.

At the USM session, David Bidler, of the Portland-based prisoner-rights organization Black Bird Collective, said his group has collected 500 signatures on an anti-torture petition that eventually will be submitted to the Portland City Council. It asks that torture be outlawed in Maine prisons, including the “prolonged periods of isolation” at the Maine State Prison’s 100-man Supermax or Special Management Unit.

The prison conditions the Attica inmates rebelled against aren't “ancient history at all,” Levasseur said — they are still the norm.

Prisoners of politics The giant sucking sound that all of Southern Maine heard coming from Forest Avenue last week was not some accidental draining of a huge milk tank at Oakhurst Dairy, but the integrity and independence of Maine’s largest public university going down the toilet. Slideshow: Thomas Manning's exhibit at the University of Southern Maine Brut portraiture: Inmate Manning's art part of outsider tradition. By Ian Paige

Corrections changes Like a movie hero, the NAACP’s new, young national president, Benjamin Jealous, swept into the 900-inmate Maine State Prison in Warren on Monday, quelling protests among the prisoners and, at least temporarily, rescuing the organization’s prison chapter from being snuffed out by state corrections officials.

Courthouse bomber to speak about social change After it was initially canceled, a controversial talk by a radical activist will go on Thursday at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Ray Luc Levasseur, who grew up in Sanford, Maine, and became a radical in part due to his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, will talk on campus in connection with a symposium on “social change.”

I've heard that story before Each year, Governor John Baldacci announces his top priority in the next legislative session will be reducing the state income tax. (“Lack of political clout? What lack of political clout?”)

Mowed down Libby describes Leahy’s spot on the committee as “good for new England — because without that voice we’d be invisible.”

A kick-start for conservation To make the most of huge chunks of incoming federal economic-stimulus cash (and to get their hands on more of it in the first place), the Maine Legislature has to ramp up its energy-efficiency planning — on the double.

Whole Foods health-care boycott gathers momentum Unfortunately for Whole Foods Market CEO and founder John Mackey, those who appreciate his store for the healthy, eco-friendly (read: left-leaning, progressive) lifestyle it promotes are the same citizens who support universal health care.

The gulf of Maine With a massively unpopular Republican president leaving office, this year’s Senate election is a contest based on a candidate’s alignment with Bush.

Federal investigation requested Stirred into action by the murder of a wheelchair-bound prisoner, human-rights activists have asked the federal Department of Justice to investigate the treatment of Maine State Prison inmates.

SUBVERSIVE SUMMER | June 18, 2014 Prisons, pot festivals, and Orgonon: Here are some different views of summertime Maine — seen through my personal political lens.

LEFT-RIGHT CONVERGENCE - REALLY? | June 06, 2014 “Unstoppable: A Gathering on Left-Right Convergence,” sponsored by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, featured 26 prominent liberal and conservative leaders discussing issues on which they shared positions. One was the minimum wage.

STATE OF POLARIZATION | April 30, 2014 As the campaign season begins, leading the charge on one side is a rural- and northern-Maine-based Trickle-Down Tea Party governor who sees government’s chief role as helping the rich (which he says indirectly helps working people), while he vetoes every bill in sight directly helping the poor and the struggling middle class, including Medicaid expansion, the issue that most occupied the Legislature this year and last.

MICHAEL JAMES SENT BACK TO PRISON | April 16, 2014 The hearing’s topic was whether James’s “antisocial personality disorder” was enough of a mental disease to keep him from being sent to prison.